


Portal 3

by redbrickrose



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-10
Updated: 2013-11-10
Packaged: 2018-01-01 02:58:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1039534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redbrickrose/pseuds/redbrickrose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>You shoot the gun aimlessly; sparks of orange and blue fade useless in the grass. You're not careless with it. You don't point it at the sky.  You don't let anyone else touch it. You just couldn’t bring yourself to disassemble it, even though you’ve seen what it can do. The new world you reemerged into is a cautionary tale about what things like that can do, after all, and it’s dangerous outside of a controlled testing environment. </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>And that’s funny, in a sharp and breathless way, desperate like the moment before turret fire.  (You're still here. Somehow, you're still here).</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Portal 3

**Author's Note:**

> I've been sitting on this for so long because it's so much bigger in my head, but it's become clear I'm not going to write the whole thing out. Assumes knowledge of Portal 2 and Half-Life; assumes Chell was actually in stasis for 100 years since that's unclear in the game; assumes a Combine-controlled dystopia.

You talk to Her, now that She’s not there to talk back, and your voice sounds strange out loud in open spaces. You sit on the replacement Companion Cube next to the shed and tell Her how it symbolizes your survival.

You don't talk to the Cube; that would be weird.

You don’t think about Caroline, and how much she looked like you in the portrait up that shadowed, endless staircase - the set of her eyes, the roundness of her face, her dark hair. It’s just too depressing. And that’s really saying something, post-apocalypse.

You shoot the gun aimlessly; sparks of orange and blue fade useless in the grass. You're not careless with it. You don't point it at the sky. You don't let anyone else touch it. You just couldn’t bring yourself to disassemble it, even though you’ve seen what it can do. The new world you reemerged into is a cautionary tale about what things like that can do, after all, and it’s _dangerous_ outside of a controlled testing environment. 

And that’s funny, in a sharp and breathless way, desperate like the moment before turret fire. (You're still here. Somehow, you're still here).

Okay, maybe it isn’t actually funny at all. Maybe you were just around Her too long.

You tell Her that too. And then you sit in the middle of the sunswept field, and the lying sky stretches out forever over your head, blue, blue, blue at the end of the world. 

***

The tires on the old truck are rusting out, and the grind against the axle rattles around in your skull. Christine lets go of your wrist only long enough to shift, like she’s afraid you’re crazy enough to throw yourself from a moving vehicle (you are), like she could stop you if you wanted to (she couldn’t, you don’t). The portal gun (sorry, Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device) is a steady weight across your thigh, and your finger itches against the trigger.

“You shouldn’t have come,” you say.

“Chell,” she starts, her voice is tight and tired; her dark eyes are hard when you finally turn to look at her.

“Watch the road,” you say, and she sighs and jerks the steering wheel; the truck bounces hard over the rocky dirt road. You brace yourself against the dashboard, and the low echo of old pain, earned in that first thwarted escape, creeps up your spine. 

You shake your head. “No, I didn’t mean…I just meant I know the way back.” Their resources are scarce and you don’t need to be watched. 

You’re so _tired_ of being watched. 

But they don’t know what to do with you at all. You’re _antisocial_ , they say. Their doctors, who are nothing more than field medics as far as you’re concerned, whisper _paranoid_ like they’re any less afraid than you are just because they’re afraid of different things. 

Everybody’s equally fucked up; it’s great. You should throw a party. There should be cake. 

Christine exhales hard through her nose. You wait. “It’s not _safe_ ,” she says. Or course it isn’t. Nothing’s _safe_ , but at least in the open there’s somewhere to run.

You say, “Don’t be _paranoid_ , Christine.”

The corner of her mouth twitches up; she's always amused by you in spite of herself, sometimes when you don't even mean to be amusing. It's probably like having a friend, except you're not sure you remember what that felt like. “Were you going to come back?” she asks, and you’re still not completely sure why they care, but:

“Yes,” you say. Of course you were. Where else would you go, really?

***

It was a company town, tucked into the shadow of Aperture Laboratories. It’s fallen to pieces now, populated by the dust of your childhood and lifetime resistance fighters who can't remember a time before the Combine. You remember. The building they use as headquarters was the new library the last time you saw it, but now everything smells like mold and time. You run your palms over the books rotting off the shelves and they crumble in your hand like memory.

You're younger than all of these people who grew up in ashes. Stasis will do that. Fucking science. Seriously.

And that, of course, is why they care if you come back. You do know. Of course you know.

Here are some things you are good at: 1) not dying, and 2) instinctive responses in a crisis that lead to not dying. Here are things they think you are good at: 1) _fucking science_. You don’t disabuse them. 

You take the gun apart, once you have tools. Clean it, put it back together, polish the white until it gleams, wipe away the stains from your own blood as best you can.

You’re in Kyle’s workshop, working with his supplies, so you try to relax under his hovering. 

“Can you build another?” he asks, caught somewhere between awe and fear. His guns use mechanics and bullets and don’t open up rifts in time or space. They don’t have technology like this outside of the Combine-controlled cities. 

“No,” you say. You’re not even lying. But even if you could, you wouldn’t. He sounds a little bit like how your parents used to sound when they talked about their work, so you don’t trust it. Not that he trusts you. Most of them don’t trust you, really, and it probably shows a certain amount of good sense. You wouldn’t trust anything that crawled out of those ruins either.

Stubborn survival and rage carried you here, and stubborn survival and curiosity will carry you further, but there are moments when the ruins around you and the darkness opening up in the back of your mind make you wonder what you fought your way out *for,* make you want to go out on some clear and open night, shoot the moon and take the whole world down with you.

You could have been good at science. They all spoke so highly of you once, bright and shining with potential. You’re so _good_ at logic puzzles, after all, so quick to make connections. Your parents preened. Henry leaned over you, standing too close, watching you put the final touches on the sign for your potato battery project and telling you what a predilection you had for that kind of work; the brilliant future you could have if you just gave everything you had to Aperture, the way your parents had. (In hindsight, that would have been better than giving everything you had to Aperture the way you did). "Shoot for the moon!" he said, his hand a hot pressure on your shoulder, too confining, before you shrugged it off with a shiver.

Shoot for the moon. Now that's funny.

***

You don’t sleep well. You’re too attuned to every noise, and every time you close your eyes you dream of freefall. 

So you aren’t sleeping at all the night Christine comes to get you because her idiot sister and her idiot sister’s friends disappear into the Aperture ruins.  
Christine is pacing back and forth in your room. She isn’t patient. She isn’t good at being still. She wouldn’t last in a testing environment.

There's a sick exhaustion-tinge to her face and her blood-shot eyes. Her hair sticks up at odd angles where she's run her fingers through it. There’s an edge of panic undercutting her movements, quick and sporadic, the way she reaches for your wrist, drops her hand again. You want to tell her to stop and breathe. It's all in the timing and panic never solved anything,

“We all went in all the time,” she says. “I’ve been in a dozen times. It’s a right of passage. It used to be safe… “

“It was safer,” you concede. _She_ wasn’t awake then, was she? But you forget sometimes, the way Aperture is a ruin and a relic and Black Mesa is their threat. It’s such a careless oversight.

"They're just _kids_ ," Christine says. She's nineteen and carries the gun at her hip like an extension of her body. You're (a hundred and) twenty-two and you fought your way out of hell twice.

Carmen is fourteen and a better shot than you are. She’s almost cruelly pragmatic, and angry with the kind of focus that would make you think she had what it takes to survive all this, if she wasn’t so impulsive and cocky, if she had any survival instinct at all. You don’t think she’s “just” anything. She would also make an even worse testing subject than her sister.

You watch the moon out the window, whole and gleaming. Jagged shadows fall across Christine’s face when you turn back to look at her.

“Chell,” she says, quiet, reluctant, so fucking _sorry_. Everything around you feels cold and slow and a little inevitable, and you wish you had it in you to say no.

“I’ll go with you,” you say.

***  
You make your way out to the labs, following Christine as she picks her way up the mountain, through the overgrown path. The morning is bright and clear and still, like the morning you climbed out of the wreckage, with the moon fading out against the lightening sky. You can hear the whisper of Kyle’s movements in the brush behind you. 

He shouldn’t be necessary out this far. You haven’t even been in a scrape out here yet, in the backwater rebel basecamp behind the laboratory that didn’t destroy the world. You’re far from the cities, and Christine’s a fighter, but she’s also cautious in ways you could never afford. She wouldn’t leave camp without a sniper because she relies on her backup. She expects to _have_ backup, and she doesn’t think you’re good with a gun. It’s part of why she’s so disgusted with you all the time, wandering out to the field trusting your own “meager training,” like she has any real understanding of what you survived. You don’t think you’re a bad shot - accurate enough, if not precise. You didn’t need to be exact when all you had to do was aim for white and pray. 

You curve your palm around the butt of the pistol you won’t need and the portal gun weighs heavy strapped to your back. Aperture is ghost stories and folktales, even to people who live in its shadow. Aperture is your nightmare history, though, and the ruins are rising dark in front of you, taking up too much of the sky.

You don’t realize you’ve stopped walking until Christine curls her hand around your wrist. “Are you okay?” she asks. And you just look at her because pointed, defensive silence is still your first instinct.

She says, “I’m sorry,” and drops her hand. You reach for her and squeeze her fingers because you’re not alone, and this time you made a choice and that means something. She’s shaking. You’re not. You walk on.


End file.
